Journalist Steve Coll to head New America Foundation

Journalist Steve Coll has been tapped to head the New America Foundation:

Mr. Coll plans to take over a nonpartisan public policy institute, the New America Foundation, in September, succeeding the founding president, Ted Halstead. Mr. Coll said he was drawn to the job by the caliber of ideas coming from the group and its interest in finding new ways to disseminate them.

“Nonprofits have to fill up some of the space that newspapers are inevitably leaving behind” as the industry changes, Mr. Coll, 49, said Friday night by phone from Washington, where he lives. Some of the journalists and scholars at New America “might have been accommodated by newspapers a generation ago,” he added, but that is not the case anymore. [NYT]

Coll is the author of the brilliant Ghost Wars, a Pulitzer-prizewinning history of America's involvement in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion to 9/11.

It will be interesting to see what role non-profits take in the dissemination news. Old school investigative journalism is almost prohibitively expensive for profit-driven papers that have to keep up with the 24-hour news cycle. Maybe non-profits can help pick up the slack.